COVID-19 Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 1 pp 1—15

Figure 6. Patients with a higher COVID-19 severity score show faster telomere shortening rates. (A, B) Telomere shortening (A) and increase in percent of short telomeres (<3kb) (B) with age in patients diagnosed with mild-moderate and severe-acute COVID-19. Linear regression analysis was used to assess the number of bp loss and of the percent of short telomeres per year (<3 kb) in PMBC of these donors. Statistical significance was assessed using the Mann-Whitney test. (C) Whisker plot representation of telomere length. The between 60-69 and older than 70-year-old were pooled together within the same age group. The patients diagnosed with mild or moderate and those diagnosed with severe or acute were grouped. The telomere length corresponding to individual telomere foci were plotted according to Covid-19 severity groups. The ends of the box are the upper and lower quartiles so that the box spans the interquartile range. The middle line represents the median and bars to standard deviation. The statistical significance was calculated by one way Anova with post tukey test. n= number of foci.